


Spliced Up

by Caz (CheeryKralie)



Category: BioShock
Genre: Addiction, Drug Abuse, Fontaine loving the sound of his own voice, M/M, Mind Games, non-mind-control manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:25:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1221118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheeryKralie/pseuds/Caz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unfortunately for Fontaine, ‘code yellow’ never took hold, and his assassin lacks a self destruct. Unfortunately for Jack, Fontaine always has another ace up his sleeve…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spliced Up

**Author's Note:**

> Hi Joy.

The Little Sisters watch him distrustfully as he leaves Tenenbaum’s safehouse. Without the plasmid glow obscuring their eyes, it’s easier to tell that they’re scared. He doesn’t like that, Jack decides. He doesn’t like that at all. They’re commodities. They shouldn’t make him feel guilty.

When he closes his eyes, he can see his own glow reflected on the back of his eyelids.

He likes that, Jack decides. No-one will be able to tell that he’s scared.

——

“I _said_ , would you _kindly_ go get stepped on by a Big Daddy?”

Jack grits his teeth, his knuckles tightening on the huge metal crank. The confrontation in Ryan’s office feels like it happened minutes ago, and he still expects to have to fight with all his strength. But there’s nothing to fight against.

The words are powerless.

His gritted teeth become a tight, triumphant grin. Jack goes back to turning the sewer door crank, and the door grates slowly open.

“Ah,” says Fontaine.

He doesn’t sound as unhappy as Jack would like. He sounds like he’s made a connection. He sounds downright pleased.

He has no _right_ to sound pleased, Jack thinks in frustration. He’s lost. The words are powerless. And Jack is going to kill him.

“Seems like Mother Goose has been playing around in your egg salad,” drawls Fontaine. Then he adds, infuriatingly smug:

“I thought she might.”

It’s not fair. Fontaine has no right to be anything but cowering in terror, not after — _Atlas_ , and — _everything_. And yet here he is, snickering into a far-off microphone, out of reach of Jack’s plasmids and chemicals and bullets.

Jack wishes he could turn the radio off. But then he’d lose contact with Tenenbaum as well, and she seems to hate Fontaine almost as much as he does. That’s as close to an ally as he’s likely to find in this city.

“Guess you’ll want to celebrate your newfound freedom,” says Fontaine. The sewer door clicks into place. Jack releases the crank. A stone ramp slopes gently up in front of him, up into the rest of the ruined city.

“Maybe even meet the guy who made you possible.” The bastard won’t shut up. When he kills him, Jack will start by taking out his tongue.

“So I’ll make this easy for you, kid. I know you’re no great intellect.”

Fontaine’s grin is audible. Jack can almost smell his self-satisfaction, though he’s not sure whether he’s picturing it on a conman’s face or an Irishman’s.

He takes a step forward, then freezes at Fontaine’s next words.

“Come meet me at my apartment in Olympus Heights. Passcode’s five-seven-four-four. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.” Fontaine laughs. “I’ll break out the champagne — and maybe even something a bit more special.”

He laughs again, while Jack stands there, hardly daring to believe that the man would just give away his location like that. Doesn’t he know what Jack’s going to do to him?

Jack doesn’t know the answer. His head is pounding.

“So come pay me a visit, would you…?”

Fontaine lets the invitation hang. Short a magic word. Taunting him.

Fontaine is going to die. He’s going to _beg_ to die.

Jack starts forward, up the slope, into the city.

——

“How long’s it been, kid?”

At first, Jack doesn’t know what Fontaine is talking about.

He’s crouched on the floor, with his back to a smoke-stained wall, surrounded by bodies. Only a few of them were killed by him. The rest were victims of attrition, throwing themselves at a hulking Big Daddy until it fell just as Jack arrived on the scene. By the time he finished the battle, the Sister had already been carried away.

He’s breathing hard. Harder now, in anger, thinking about the lost Sister. She should’ve been his.

“Thought I paid for a better show,” says Fontaine, with a laugh that makes Jack’s knuckles go white on his wrench. “But on the other hand, guess you can’t blame a car for goin’ slow on an empty tank.”

Jack’s lips form the word: _what?_

The radio crackles again, but this time it’s Tenenbaum.

“This plan, it has every sign of a trap from Fontaine,” she says, her voice as sharp as ever. “There is danger here, yes. But there will be even more once you enter his apartment. Be careful.”

Her advice just puts his hackles up. Who does she think she is? He never needs to be careful. He’s too strong to need to be careful.

So what if it’s a trap? He’s fought his way out of traps. Jack searches for the bravado he’s gotten used to. The sense of invincibility that he adds to with every successful harvest. It’s slow in coming, but if he can convince himself he feels it, that’s the same thing, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t buoy him up in the way he likes. It leaves room for doubts that he doesn’t want.

Jack unhooks his last EVE hypo from his belt and injects it, but it only adds to the wound-up frustration. He hates Fontaine. He hates Tenenbaum. He hates the splicers who got here before him and stole his Sister. If he’d just been a few minutes earlier…

He growls and pushes himself to his feet, and carries on.

——

“Hurts me to see you like this, kid,” says Fontaine, as Jack slams his wrench into the wall.

Another Big Daddy corpse. Another Sister gone. None of the bodies even carry EVE. There’s something he should be paying attention to, something about the splicers now dancing to Fontaine’s tune, but it’s wiped away in the sudden _rage_ at his rightful prize being stolen from him.

“I gotta say,” says Fontaine, his voice a grating noise in Jack’s head, “you weren’t exactly all smiles and roses back in the old man’s office, but this is something else.”

Good, Jack thinks savagely. Let him notice how much tighter Jack is wound. Let him see how hot he’s burning. Let him be fucking terrified.

Only problem is, Fontaine doesn’t sound terrified.

“Then again,” the man drawls, “maybe I ain’t remembering too well. It’s been a while, kid. How long would you say?”

Jack glowers as he sets off along a scarred balcony. He _can’t_ say. He was _unconscious_. How stupid can Fontaine be?

Then Fontaine answers his own question. “Coupla days, at least.”

Jack stops walking.

He would have guessed hours at most. Not _days._

“Lotta surgery to get out three little words,” says Fontaine. “Maybe they were buried near the back.”

A couple of days. His skin crawls.

“Gotta congratulate you, kid, you’re doing well.” Fontaine laughs and the noise stabs through Jack’s head. It hurts, his head. It’s been hurting since he woke up. “Never spliced myself, but I’m a smoking man, and if someone took the smokes away for that long? Whoo-ee…”

His voice gets subtly closer, and there’s the buzz of his breath across a microphone. Jack’s transfixed by it.

“…I’d be crawling up the _walls._ ”

Jack turns slowly, and stares at the spidery cracks in the stone where his wench connected with the wall. His throat is tight.

It’s bullshit. It’s got to be. He’s spliced, but he’s not a _splicer._ And if they made him, wouldn’t they have made him so he wouldn’t — wouldn’t get like that? Addicted. Sick. It makes sense that they would.

“Don’t worry,” says Fontaine. “I got something up here to take the edge off — _if_ you pick up the pace.”

If a hundred years passed, Jack would still never admit to the way his breath stops for a moment at that promise.

——

There’s a large plaque by the elevator that reads _F. Fontaine._ It doesn’t take a genius to guess who lives here.

The security panel is dark, waiting. Jack gets hold of himself for long enough to punch in the four-digit code — literally punch it in, hurried and distracted. Nothing happens.

He punches the whole keypad. It doesn’t respond. The elevator door remains closed.

His radio crackles.

“There’s a problem, kid,” says that horrible, drawling voice. Jack clenches his hands into fists. He swears his veins are so dry he can feel them move.

“Lock’s shorted out. I can fix it from here, but maybe you’d rather give it a little jolt of lightning. Speed things up.”

He feels like a splicer dancing to a tune. But he can’t think of anything else to do. Jack raises his left fist, and tries to send some Electrobolt into the security panel.

It’s like trying to push out splinters. His veins are choked with dust. Jack’s eyes water and he shakes his arm, and the pain recedes to a dry, crawling feeling. He’s got no EVE left. No EVE at all.

Jack has never felt so hollow or exhausted.

“No?” says Fontaine after a moment. “Then I guess I’ll do it myself.”

There’s a hint of satisfaction in his voice. The light of the security panel flickers on, easy as that.

Jack puts in the code again, and the elevator door slides open.

He shouldn’t go. He should go back and find EVE first, he’s handicapped otherwise, and the lack of it itches distractingly. But what he needs isn’t behind him — it’s at the top of this elevator, and it might not be there for long. Fontaine. Fontaine dead, slowly, _painfully_ dead. And, maybe, what Fontaine can give him.

One foot after another, Jack walks into the elevator.

——

Jack steps out of the elevator into a vast covered garden. In front of him is a lawn of raked sand, leading to a sweeping staircase to the second floor. He can’t imagine anywhere else in Rapture this scene would be left untouched.

It could look elegant, but Jack decides that if Fontaine likes raked sand, then he hates it.

His radio crackles.

“Good to be in the old homestead again,” says Fontaine, drawing out every syllable. Jack can just imagine him stretched luxuriously on a couch, cigar smoke curling to the ceiling. He wants to punch the image in the face.

“Keep moving. I got a whole collection up here, just waiting on you.”

The image fills up with glowing red bottles. Jack blinks it away and then strides forward, skirting around the sand.

“And mark my words, you won’t see anything like this from Mother Goose. She cares too much about her little freaks to give you what you need.”

Fontaine keeps talking, and Jack can’t help but listen. The radio won’t be quiet. His own racing brain won’t be quiet.

“She drains the ADAM outta them and she flushes it down the drain.” Jack doesn’t know if it’s true, but just the thought of it makes him mad with frustration. He can feel the ADAM leaking through his fingers.

“Child.”

He starts. It’s Tenenbaum.

“Never do you listen, but listen now, and listen well. You are in danger.”

“Let me make one thing clear,” says Fontaine sharply. “You don’t get zip if you let the Kraut say one more word.”

Dead silence for a few heartbeats. Even Jack can tell he’s being asked to do something very foolish. Tenenbaum’s the only person who is — who might be — an ally.

But the words bounce around his throbbing skull. He’ll get nothing. _Nothing_. And Tenenbaum won’t give it to him. And what if he scours the rest of Rapture and doesn’t find a single Sister? What if—

The radio crackles. Tenenbaum’s frequency.

Jack’s hollow veins make the decision for him. In a moment of panic, he snaps the radio off. Yanks the strap off his shoulder. Throws the whole thing down.

There’s a CRACK as it hits the tiled floor. It sits there, silent. It might even be broken.

He backs away like it’s a murder victim.

_You won’t get zip._

Jack shakes his head in a vain attempt to clear it, then jogs towards the staircase, following the invisible force that pulls him on. The further away from the radio he gets, he hopes, the surer he’ll be that that was the right thing to do.

Fontaine’s voice purrs out of the PA system.

“Good boy.”

Despite everything, those two words make him feel a little better.

——

Fontaine is standing above him on a broad balcony. There’s a plasmid bottle in his hand and a mocking smile on his face.

He’s tall, with a cleft chin and eyes the colour of gunmetal. He looks exactly the way Jack pictured him, back when he thought his name was Atlas. Did the people who programmed him have something to do with that? Maybe he doesn’t want to know.

There’s a plasmid bottle in Fontaine’s hand.

He’s too far away to punch in the jaw, too far away to strangle and claw at, but not too far away to shoot.

Jack reaches behind his back, and swings his rifle forwards.

There’s a plasmid bottle in Fontaine’s hand.

The man’s smile tightens.

“Watch where you’re pointing that stick, kid. Be a shame if I dropped this.” The bottle dangles loosely from his fingers, as if to drive home the threat.

He could kill Fontaine right here.

He can’t stop looking at the bottle.

The sight of it is turning all his exhaustion into nervous energy, and that energy tugs him in every direction. His hand is twitching on the butt of the rifle.

He makes himself look at Fontaine’s face. There’s a ruby glow cast on it from underneath.

It’s not enough to shoot him, Jack decides. It’s too kind to kill him quickly. Even a shot to the gut might not give Jack the time he wants to really make Fontaine suffer. He has to get up to that balcony and get his hands around Fontaine’s neck.

He lowers the rifle.

Fontaine breathes.

“Good choice, kid.”

But it doesn’t feel like a choice at all.

“By the way,” says Fontaine, “growing boys need their shuteye.”

——

He rises up from somewhere very deep, and finds metal around his wrists. Around his ankles. Handcuffs.

“Welcome back,” says a sideways man. No. Not sideways. Jack’s lying down. He blinks. The room slides out of focus and he blinks again.

 _This is wrong,_ says some survival instinct in his brain, and Jack wakes up.

“Your Mother Goose is losing her touch,” says Fontaine.

He stands in front of Jack, not two feet away, infuriatingly relaxed. They’re in a spacious room, all frescoes and luxury, hardly touched by fighting. Jack’s weapons are gone. And as he talks, Fontaine tosses the glowing red bottle in the air and then catches it, up and down, up and down, like a toy.

“Thought for sure she woulda taken that one out.”

Up and down, up and down.

“Pity for you she wasn’t that thorough, huh?”

Up and down, leaving a red smear on the air. Lending a sick red bloom to the skin of Fontaine’s hand.

“Thanks for coming here, by the way. Makes things a lot easier on me, ya know?”

His view of the bottle is interrupted as Fontaine’s face moves right in front of Jack’s.

Jack throws himself forward, with a snarl that’s barely human. His body feels light without weapons — or maybe that’s just his head. The cuffs chafe against his wrists and ankles, yanking him back, and Fontaine hardly flinches.

“Ha! So you are still in there. I was startin’ to worry.”

“Let me go,” says Jack.

It comes out as a growl. It’s an order. Jack has never given orders before, but if he’s going to start, this seems like the perfect time.

At last, Fontaine looks taken aback.

It’s delicious, for about three seconds. Then he barks out a laugh.

“And you have a voice! Kid, let me tell you, I almost thought they didn’t give you one!”

“Let me go,” says Jack again.

“Not much of a vocabulary, though,” says Fontaine. His smile is firmly back in place. Jack wants to tear it off with his bare teeth. “Guess I shoulda given Suchong those bonuses he asked for. But hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right, kid?”

Jack doesn’t answer. His jaw is clenched and his cheeks are burning.

Fontaine almost looks disappointed.

This whole thing was a trap. It’s so obvious now. Tenenbaum was right, and Jack was wrong, and the whole thing was a trap. Maybe Jack never even stood a chance. Maybe Suchong and the others _designed_ him to lose.

He twists and tugs on the handcuffs, but even with his strength, they don’t give. The frame he’s attached to is sturdy, a sturdy iron bed frame. It’s elegantly wrought. It would look better, in Jack’s opinion, sticking out of Fontaine’s ruined head.

“Hold still,” says Fontaine. Jack redoubles his struggling. Fontaine holds up the plasmid bottle, and an empty needle.

Jack freezes. The bottle glows, and his nerves twinge with remembered fire.

His whole body’s screaming to be filled up with it again.

Maybe it would solve everything. Maybe it would ruin everything. Maybe it would give him the strength to break out of these cuffs. Maybe it would just make him feel like a supernova, and fuck everything else.

He licks his dry lips.

“I said I had somethin’ for you,” says Fontaine smoothly. “And you know what? Sometimes I’m a man of my word.”

——

He’s never spliced this much at once before.

Jack can’t feel his handcuffs.

Maybe 160 ADAM in one sitting is a lot. Doing that several times a day — it’s a lot. He’s gotten accustomed to a lot. But as it turns out, Fontaine has more. Much more.

Everything he can see has a halo of gold.

Fontaine approaches with a newly-filled syringe. Jack doesn’t ask what it is, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care what the last dozen things were that he’s been shot with. He doesn’t know what that is seeping out of his plasmid hand. And he doesn’t try to shoot it at Fontaine — because if Fontaine dies, _the flow of ADAM stops._

The colours of Fontaine’s face are too bright. Jack can taste the way he looks.

Presumably he sets the needle and pushes the plunger, but all Jack feels is the wave going through his body, good like breaking glass, powerful like a crashing car. His mouth opens in a strangled noise. His vision goes black as his eyes’ own brightness burns them out, returns as ADAM snakes its way into the cells and renews them.

Seconds are turning to minutes, and minutes aren’t fitting together from one to the next.

“What do you do with a man who can’t die?”

Jack hopes the question wasn’t for him, because he’s in no fit state to string together a reply.

Luckily, the golden voice answers itself. “You make sure he’s more of a danger to himself than he is to you.”

That’s clever, Jack thinks in a detached sort of way, as he hangs from the cuffs with his whole body buzzing. He’s clever.

Fontaine crouches in front of him so that their faces are level. “Not that you needed much help with that, huh? _Boyo?_ ”

Just like that, his voice changes. Atlas is crouched in front of Jack. Atlas. Jack smiles. He looks exactly the way Jack pictured him.

“Oh, boyo,” says Atlas. “What I wouldn’t give to know what’s going through that pretty head of yours.”

The urge wells up to tear at that oversaturated face, alongside the urge to just… touch it. But his chains clink and he can’t do either. Does he hate Fontaine? Did he love Atlas? Which one is which?

There was a question somewhere in there. He nods, because to please the man in front of him is the most important thing in the world. Just to keep the ADAM coming.

He’s rewarded with a laugh and a sting in his wrist.

“Lucky for me,” says Atlas, as he sets another glowing needle, “we never got around to making you ADAM-proof.”

It sets off a weird chord, something Jack can’t quite remember, a fear he had. But then the ADAM scorches his veins and he forgets, he forgets that he’s forgotten.

The glow of his eyes makes Fontaine’s grin look like it’s made of molten gold.

He likes that, Jack decides, in a moment that flees like dust as his consciousness kalaedoscopes away.


End file.
